It was a historic occurrence! Every Monday in the morning, all of our teams gather at our office for a half hour meetup. Usually, a few managers give speeches to bring everybody up to speed on the recent developments at the company. Sometimes, the floor is taken by our guests—usually our partners from other cities. But yesterday, we had the most unusual Monday meetup ever. For the first time in our history, our speaker gave his speech not in Russian, not even in English, but in German. It was Thomas Kochmann.

It’s time to sum up the results of 2017 for Dodo Pizza. The main point: we haven’t made it.

In the beginning of 2017, we publicly set an ambitious goal: end the year with 400 pizza shops in the chain. This number looked insane and fantastic, but we did the math and came up with a solid plan that made it look doable.

We have always been setting challenging goals to hit in order to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and come up with unconventional solutions. We’ve worked hard. We’ve done probably everything we could. But we didn’t succeed.

We’re missing something. That’s what our team has been thinking while working on this blog lately. And rightly so, because actually, we’ve been missing a lot. Dodo Story was created as a management blog for a global audience of entrepreneurs and leaders. From day one, the blog covered the story of our American branch from the management point of view, which was quite a ballsy attempt to barge into a crowded pizza market in a small college city in the States (Oxford, Mississippi, to be precise). We had our moments on this blog…

Let’s admit it: we chickened out. Two years ago, our team came up with a business model for Dodo Pizza that awed us. We aimed to offer a much better product for delivery, but for the same price people usually pay. Just before the launch, we pulled the plug and raised our prices. Now, with opening a new pizzeria in Southaven, we’re giving our old spunky idea a second chance.

I figured it would be cool just to work behind the scenes for a little while and then get back to writing this blog with some breaking news. And here I am with an announcement: we’re opening our first dine-in Dodo Pizza restaurant in the US. If you’ve followed our story for a while, you might be perplexed, because we’re doing something we said we wouldn’t ever do. Why the sudden change of heart?